In the Cold, Cold Night
by Rachibert
Summary: It's all fun and games until you start living together.


Disclaimer: I own nothing, please don't sue me.

A/N: This is probably as close to fluff as I am capable of writing, and I hope you enjoy it. Happy Valentine's Day!

* * *

He was doing it again. Though they had been happily cohabitating for a couple of months now, there were moments when she wanted to hold her pillow over his face until he stopped struggling.

Everything else was going smoothly. They had successfully kept the information from their coworkers so as to avoid the inevitable rumors and innuendo, not to mention their job security. It was decided early on to keep it a secret until it was more settled and stable, just in case. They made sure to always arrive to work in separate cars and different times and to leave the same way. Even their cell phones got new cases in different colors to avoid accidentally answering the wrong one and giving away their secret. The even went so far as to be short with one another in the lab and stay as far apart as possible, rarely working a case together. If anything, the rest of the team probably thought they weren't speaking again.

Even their dining habits had been easy to meld together. They moved his experiments (and meat) into the small refrigerator in his insect room. He became rather dependent on those Louis Rich pre-cooked chicken strips that he could easily add to his plate without all of those nasty animal bits touching any of her food. And after a while she stopped trying to get him to lay off the jelly donuts and Cheetos.

She used the left side of his walk-in closet and he didn't complain too much when her shoe collection marched over onto his side and started conquering his space. He even didn't mind when she decided that his entire method of wardrobe storage was completely wrong and starting hanging up his jeans and t-shirts instead of folding them and laying them in a pile on the floor of the closet. She even stopped complaining that he put her good bras in the dryer.

After a couple of mix-ups when determining which toothbrush went to whom after being woken up at an ungodly hour to check out some dead bodies, she kept a ponytail holder wrapped around the handle of hers. Apparently "mine is pink, yours is blue" is a pretty difficult concept when faced with the excitement of corpses and insects. He can recite Shakespeare and Nietzsche at the drop of a hat but can't remember which toothbrush is his.

They even worked out who handled what chores really easily, they just decided to not bother at all and hired a service that came in once a week. It really cut down on the debate over whose turn it was to clean the toilet. The basics were easier; who cooked didn't have to clean dishes, and he had to take out the trash.

The problem was in the bedroom. And not in that way, that part was all going smoothly, better than she expected actually. The problem stemmed from an insomniac sharing a bed with a snorer. There is no worse pain than lying in a bed night after night trying desperately to sleep while knowing that the man lying right next to you was sleeping like a baby. He couldn't keep himself to his side of the bed either, and seemed to have some foolish notion that people in love should sleep snuggled up tightly with one another. Part of her believed that he possibly thought that if air could pass between them, all the "love and affection" could evaporate into that air and float away.

So she lay there on "her" side of the bed, trapped beneath his right leg and arm, staring at the ceiling. A part of her mused that possibly he never got enough attention from his mother when he was a child, and perhaps that's why he's so clingy when he sleeps, while another part of her mind reasoned that he was so used to not having to share a bed that he still assumed (at least while he was unconscious) that the entire thing was his. Her romantic side believed his intense need for closeness was based on all the wasted time spent apart that he was trying to make up for, but after sleeplessly lying in bed for three hours listening to him breathe (how dare he!) those thoughts had been squelched, composted, and recycled into a growingly irrational fury.

Before the current living arrangement, it was a rare occurrence that they were able to spend the entire night together, mostly using their "alone time" to release all of that bottled up sexual tension before rushing off to duty or whatever. Now though, the relationship had passed that stage. The sweet fantasy of waking up in one another's arms has been replaced with the reality of waking up in each other's arms, only you have to be able to go to sleep in the first place to wake up.

She looked over at the clock; there were still two hours to get through before they needed to get out of bed for work. As her head fell back onto the pillow she sighed loudly. She knew she wasn't going to be able to get any quality sleep in two hours; she might as well get out of the bed.

Rolling over onto her left side only caused him to spoon up against her back tightly, and she could feel him drooling just a little bit on the back of her neck. The new position also gave him the ability to cup a breast with one hand while he slept. She knew that since he now had something to hold on to it was just going to be that much more difficult to escape.

She tried to slip out of the bed once again, only to be rewarded with his grip on her tightening and some of the air getting smooshed out of her while he grumbled in his sleep. She cursed silently as she tried to get him to roll over, poking him a little in the side, since it had worked with previous boyfriends that were snoring away. After she gave up on that tactic, she tried rolling herself over, maybe she could roll right out of his grasp without waking him up.

No such luck tonight; the moment she got one foot on the cold hardwood floor, he sleepily asked her where they needed to go to collect the bugs while he reached for his glasses. She told him she just had to go to the bathroom and to go back to sleep. He replied that he couldn't go back to sleep without her with him in the bed, right before yawning and starting to snore again. She rolled her eyes while she headed down the hall, waiting until she shut the bedroom door behind her before turning on the light.


End file.
